The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

10.5. Evaluating Interactions

Managing the quality of an interaction with respect to its intent or goal is a crucial part of every step from design through implementation and especially during operation. Evaluating the quality of interactions at different times in the design process (design concept, prototype, implementation, and operation) reveals both strengths and weaknesses to the designers or operators of the organizing system.

During the design and implementation stages, interactions need to be tested against the original goals of the interaction and the constraints that are imposed by the organizing system, its resources and external conditions. It is very common for processes in interactions to be tweaked or tuned to better comply with the original goals and intentions for the interaction. Evaluation during these stages often attempts to provide a calculable way to measure this compliance and supports the fine-tuning process. It should be an integral part of an iterative design process.

During the later implementation and operation stages, interactions are evaluated with respect to the dynamically changing conditions of the organizing system and its environment. User expectations as well as environmental conditions or constraints can change and need to be checked periodically. A systematic evaluation of interactions ensures that changes that affect an interaction are observed early and can be integrated in order to adjust and even improve the interaction. At these stages, ...